Television

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

The economic toll of incarceration in the U.S. exceeds $1 trillion

The economic toll of incarceration in the U.S.
exceeds $1 trillion, and more than half of that falls on the families and
communities of the people incarcerated, says a recent study by
Washington University researchers, the reported St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “For
every dollar in corrections spending, there’s another 10 dollars of other types
of costs to families, children and communities that nobody sees because it
doesn’t end up on a state budget,” said Michael McLaughlin, the doctoral
student and certified public accountant who led the study. “Incarceration
doesn’t happen in a vacuum.” The study’s authors claim to be the first to
assign a dollar amount to the societal costs of incarceration, not just the
governmental costs of running corrections systems, which is estimated at $80
billion annually. That number “considerably underestimates the true cost of
incarceration by ignoring important social costs,” the researchers wrote. Some costs of incarceration include the
wages people no longer earn while imprisoned — $70.5 billion — and the amount
of lifetime earnings they will likely lose out on — $230 billion — after they
get out because of employment restrictions and discrimination against the
formerly incarcerated, the study says. The formerly incarcerated have a
mortality rate that is 3.5 times higher than people who were not incarcerated,
and researchers estimated the cost of their shortened lives to be $62.6
billion. As for the communities where incarcerated people live, the researchers
believe the biggest cost — $285.8 billion — is the criminogenic effect of prison,
or the theory that prison reinforces criminal behavior.

About Matt

An analysis of crime and punishment from the perspective of a former prosecutor and current criminal justice practitioner.
The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions or postions of any county, state or federal agency.